The First Course in Astrobiology at Modern College in Pune, India

BMSIS Scientist Dr. Parag Vaishampayan recently coordinated with Dr. Rebecca Thombre of Modern College of Arts, Science and Commerce in Pune, India, to offer the college’s first certificate course in astrobiology. Ten students from the college took this initial course offering, studying topics related to the origin of life, evolution, space exploration, planetary protection, and the quest to find habitable worlds beyond the Earth. Over 15 days, the students considered the history of Indian space exploration, endeavors in the science […]

Read more

NASA’s Frontier Development Lab: Tackling humanity’s biggest challenges with Artificial Intelligence

For the third time since 2016, machine learning experts and space scientists will spend the summer in Silicon Valley working on some of NASA’s most important present day challenges as the part of the NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL). The 8 week long program, which takes place at the SETI Institute, will consider issues ranging from predicting solar storms to finding evidence of life beyond Earth. BMSIS Scientist and Founder of the The Explainables, Daniel Angerhausen, is an FDL science […]

Read more

BMSIS Scientists Involved with NExSS Strategies to Search for Life on Exoplanets

NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet Systems Science (NExSS) has gathered researchers from around the world to support and accelerate NASA’s programs created techniques to answer the question: “Are we alone?” To this end, NExSS has produced a comprehensive series of papers outlining the past, present, and future of research on how to search for signs of life on exoplanets (planets around other stars). BMSIS Scientists Eddie Schwieterman, Sara Walker, Betul Kacar, and Daniel Angerhausen are contributors to these articles. The pace […]

Read more

Ethics: A Trip to Space

Grishma Gupte shares her ethics & society case study, which she completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. Aristotle the legendary Greek philosopher said, “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual.” Although, humans are known as social “animals”, yet we consider ourselves to be superior to other animals. With our highly developed cortex, we demonstrate […]

Read more

Outreach: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Astronomy

BMSIS Young Scientist Sumeet Kulkami gave a talk at the British Council’s “Cafe Scientifique.” Read his reflections below. I started with a brief history of the development of Artificial intelligence, and highlighted the difference in how a regular computer algorithm works as opposed to a machine learning algorithm, using the popular Towers of Hanoi toy. I also talked about how the development of computing power and AI was best reflected in how they conquered two games: chess and GO respectively. […]

Read more

Outreach: Inspiring the Younger Generation

Blue Marble Space Institute of Science Young Scientist Participants at NASA Ames, Genesis Berlanga and Stephanie Meursing, conducted an outreach workshop with four and five-year-old students at Stanford Madera Grove Childcare Center which was facilitated by their instructor, Vanya Chandra. We spoke about planetary science, geology, our X-ray diffraction work, and spectroscopy work at NASA, in support of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover and the CheMin instrument. The activity included talking about rocks, rover instruments, and passing around various […]

Read more

Outreach: Society lives by faith and develops by science

BMSIS Young Scientist Grishma Gupte led an outreach event at the University of Mumbai, India. The Young Scientist Program (YSP) of BMSIS gave me the opportunity to promote science in the society. On 25th February, 2018 I conducted an outreach event for students of a certificate course in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Mumbai. The topic of my presentation was Astrobiology, and it consisted of various aspects ranging from the basic definition of life to exoplanets. I always […]

Read more

The Ethics of Reproducibility in Computational Research

Sumeet Kulkarni shares his ethics & society case study, which he completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. I was motivated to choose this topic for study since my own BMSIS YSP project involved the computational modelling of bubbles growing in lava. The vesicles they leave behind when the lava solidifies into rock are important proxies in determining the atmospheric pressures at that epoch. This method has already been put into use in field studies of vesicle size distributions in […]

Read more

Afshin Khan & SustainSpace Win Overall Prize at ESA Contest

BMSIS scientist Dr. Afshin Khan, along with her team member Mark Ciotola, was selected as the overall winner for the 2017 Space Exploration Masters competition. The contest was initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA) as well as other government and private space organizations. The team’s project was titled “Plant germination during spaceflight to test for adaptability of crops in long term space missions.” Dr. Khan and colleagues plan to continue developing their idea for improving plant yield through space […]

Read more

Virtual Outreach with New Horizon Elementary School

BMSIS Young Scientist Shaelyn Silverman led an outreach event at New Horizon Elementary School in Irvine, California. On September 29th, 2017 I had the privilege of leading a virtual outreach event for a 3rd grade class of New Horizon Elementary School, located in Irvine, CA. Through FaceTime I gave the students a tour of the Exobiology branch at NASA Ames and showed them the exciting microbial mats in the Microbial Ecology & Biogeochemistry Research Laboratory where I work. We discussed […]

Read more
1 … 13 14 15 16 17 … 36